I’ve been working with so many students who turn to it as a first resort for everything. The second a problem stumps them, it’s AI. The first source for research is AI.
It’s not even about the tech, there’s just something about not wanting to learn that deeply upsets me. It’s not really something I can understand. There is no reason to avoid getting better at writing.
Counterpoint, it means that writing papers is no longer a good exercise for ensuring students are learning material and teachers need to adapt. AI isn’t going away and it’s a disservice to students to not teach them how to use it, how to find good primary sources, etc
Ok, so draw the rest of the owl then. What alternative is there right now, ready for use, that will engage the students with the material as well as writing does?
It’s going to differ by subject but take for example a science class: lab activities like having students, in-class come up with a hypothesis, a methodology, and then the ability to carry out the experiment, and form a conclusion. AI can help and teachers should help them use it correctly. Or in history, you can set up debates between two “sides”. Think of teaching about the push for unions in the US - have them represent the capitalists and the union leaders. AI can aid with research, have them then manually confirm each to teach about AI hallucinations, then have them debate in-class. I would argue papers are some of the worst ways to ensure students understand a topic but I’m biased as that’s just not how my brain works and I always hated writing papers vs doing research and demonstrating understanding
Learning how to construct logical arguments, do research that makes sense, and communicate effectively to the right audience, all of which AI writing sucks at.
Let me ask you something. It is completely possible for a machine to do simple welds, right? Would you say that there is no reason for a welder to practice simple welds since a machine can do it?
To me, the same is true of writing. Nobody cares about the essay that was written, but it is practicing for writing that people do care about You can’t learn skills like this without doing them.
If the class is a writing/language class then yes, work on writing. But if the class is history and writing is simply the task to gauge understanding of the topic, that’s no longer the correct approach
That’s not actually how school works until advanced grades. Even in the unlikely case they have multiple teachers, the curriculum is designed to reinforce skills across itself. Math has reading, history writing, etc. etc. It is possible for one thing to be doing multiple things and disrupting that ecosystem can easily break it completely.